There are many situations that demand that a person protect his or her arms, hands, legs, or feet from coming into contact with a liquid. A doctor, a nurse, or a lab technician may, for example, need to handle a bio-hazardous material. Likewise, a patient with a bandage, plaster cast, or intravenous catheter may desire to shower or bathe without having the bandage, cast, or catheter get wet.
As a result, there have been several attempts to produce gloves and boots that can provide a watertight covering for a person's extremities. These attempts include, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,727,864; 4,845,780; 4,884,300; 5,867,832; and 6,442,761; as well as U.S. Pat. Publication Nos. 2006/0185059 and 2010/0017939; and European Patent No. 695157. Each of these various designs relies on a mechanism for tightly closing the open end of the glove or boot around the wearer's appendage in order to produce a watertight seal. Nevertheless, these existing solutions suffer from several disadvantages. They are difficult to use, are ineffective at keeping the wearer dry, and/or are overly complex and therefore expensive to manufacture.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a covering that is capable of providing reliable watertight protection to the wearer while, at the same time, remaining easy to use and inexpensive to manufacture.